film directors
Adam Sweeting
As the air echoes with wars and rumours of wars, Hive has the potential to strike a chord resonating way beyond its Kosovan setting. The factually-based story is set in the aftermath of the Balkan conflicts of the late 1990s, after Serbian forces had carved a trail of rape, murder and destruction through Kosovo’s Albanian communities.Written and directed by Kosovo-born Blerta Basholli, Hive looks at how a group of women returned to their devastated village of Krusha and set about salvaging some kind of life from the wreckage. Most of their husbands had been rounded up and “disappeared” by the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the hagiographic side. But Letts has led such a dynamic life that the lack of any critical voices is forgivable, especially when there’s a wealth of great archive (much of it from Letts’ own collection) and good anecdotes from the likes of Mick Jones, John Lydon and Daddy G.Born in Brixton to parents who had come over from Jamaica in the mid ‘50s to work on the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You generally find that a movie with Andrea Riseborough in it is worth a look, and so it proves here. Written and directed by Belfast-born Stacey Gregg, Here Before is a nicely-focused story which plays echoes of the supernatural off against a taut family drama set in a naturalistic, usually rain-dampened Northern Ireland. Refreshingly refusing to outstay its welcome, it profits from recognising its limitations (ie a small budget) and working within them.Laura (Riseborough) and Brandon (Jonjo O’Neill) are maintaining an even strain, keeping the family home ship-shape while bringing up their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Even today, Charlie Chaplin still earns glowing accolades from critics for his work during the formative years of cinema, though a contemporary viewing public saturated in CGI and superheroes might struggle to see the allure of his oeuvre as the “Little Tramp”. Nonetheless, his films such as City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator are built into the foundations of motion picture history.As its title reveals, this new documentary, directed by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, pitches itself as a quest for the “real” Chaplin, surely something of a wild goose chase since Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
A man sits at a table in an otherwise bare room. Shot in monochrome and positioned off-centre, he reads a newspaper and smokes a cigar, lazily obscured as two other figures drift into and out of shot. A brief fight ensues. A man falls to the floor and is dragged away. Suddenly, a door opens. A new man stands at the foot of a staircase. It leads to another room, where yet more men await.This is early Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the first film in the first volume of Arrow’s new collection of his works. The movie’s title is Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), and its opening is typical of a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Almodóvar has rarely returned to the petrified Spain of his youth, flinging off Franco’s oppression by ignoring it in his early films of freewheeling provocation, where anarchic, hot freedom was all of the law. In this sober tale of secrets and lies, though, his nation’s past is literally dug up.Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer living a chic Madrid life, but the village where she was raised is still haunted by the Fascist murder of her great-grandfather and others. Dishy forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde) agrees to help find the bodies, and in elegantly edited elisions we Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In my teens, I was one of the budding cinephiles who ran the Film Club at my boarding school. Once a month, we’d rent an arthouse movie. The films would be projected on the Saturday night.Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) was a revelation. As we staggered out of the packed hall, still haunted by the unforgettable shot of Death leading those whose fate he'd announced, in silhouette on the crest of a windswept hill, there was a spontaneous wave of elation: the entire audience clamoured to see the film again the next day. This was the first time in my life that I'd ever watched a film Read more ...
theartsdesk
Like every other artform, cinema suffered greatly in a year of lockdowns. But despite an ever-changing outlook, theartsdesk still managed to review over 130 films in 2021!Long-awaited blockbusters and no-budget indies fought for screen space big and small, but only a select few achieved five star status. Here are the 2021 releases our critics deemed perfect:The Dig (28 January 2021)This adaptation of John Preston’s novel features Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and Lily James in a haunting exploration of time and timelessness.Our reviewer Adam Sweeting said: “The Dig really is a story for the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 1999, The Matrix offered something revolutionary. With a heady brew of William Gibson-influenced cyberpunk, Platonic philosophy and Prada, it proved that blockbusters could be both smart and action-packed. Remember those days? Two decades on, The Matrix films have been the subject of doctoral theses, inspired a new era of sci-fi's, video games, and spawned the idea we are all living in a simulation (it’s worth digging out Rodney Ascher’s incredibly enjoyable, A Glitch in the Matrix). Now in The Matrix Resurrections we return to the world created by the Wachowskis. Lana Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
A brief warning to readers: while effort is made to avoid spoilers, I would advise anyone who has somehow missed the massive amount of online speculation about the film’s plot to not read on. See the film first, and please come back. Right… on to business. In No Way Home Tom Holland makes his third outing as Spider-Man with returning director Jon Watts at the helm. In the film’s opening credits, we are reminded that Peter Parker’s identity has been exposed as Spider-Man and he has been framed for a crime by the FX wizard Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal). Struggling to come to terms with his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found a way to sustain a career in Hollywood long after the age when the industry likes to throw its leading women on the scrapheap.She plays Jackie Justice, a successful MMA fighter (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, otherwise known as cage fighting) whose career has disastrously stalled as her personal life has fallen apart. We meet her while she’s living in Read more ...